Salt Pork
breakfast, the night previously soak Cut as many slices as needed; if for half milk, either skimmed milk, sour in a pint of milk and water, about oneis clear, and roll in corn meal and fry. milk or buttermilk; rinse till the water It is as nice as fresh pork.
A thrift dish: salt pork soaked to draw out the brine, then breaded in cornmeal and fried. The soak is the whole recipe — skip it and the meat is inedibly salty.
- The soakSlices go overnight into about a pint of liquid, roughly half milk and half water. Skimmed milk, sour milk or buttermilk are all named; the dilution draws salt out of the meat.
- Rinse until clearRinse the slices under cold water until the runoff is no longer cloudy, then pat thoroughly dry. Wet pork will not hold cornmeal and will spit in the pan.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe does not specify; salt pork is conventionally cut thin, around 1/4 inch, which fries through without curling.
- Corn mealThe period ingredient is plain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not polenta-grade coarse grind. A medium grind gives the crust the recipe is after.
- The fatNo added fat is needed. Start the slices in a dry, moderately hot heavy skillet; the pork renders enough to fry its own coating. Turn once, about 3-4 minutes a side, until crisp and browned.
- What salt pork is nowSupermarket salt pork is fatty belly or fatback cured in dry salt, sold in a block near the bacon. It is not bacon: it is unsmoked and considerably saltier. Buy a piece with visible lean streaks if you can.
- YieldFigure two or three slices per person at breakfast, alongside eggs, fried potatoes or cornbread.
Salt pork was the default meat of the American household for most of the nineteenth century — cheap, shelf-stable without ice, and available in any general store. Milk-soaking and cornmeal-dredging is the standard treatment found across regional cookbooks of the period, and the promise here, that it is "as nice as fresh pork," tells you plainly that fresh pork was the thing a cook would rather have been serving. The same technique underlies the fried salt pork with milk gravy still cooked in parts of New England and Appalachia.